The New Yorker – May 13, 2019

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26 THENEWYORKER,M AY 13, 2019

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Noise is now seen as a factor in a range of ailments, including heart disease.

DEPT.OFPUBLICHEALTH

VOLUMETRICS

Why noise pollution is more dangerous than we think.

BY DAVID OWEN

ILLUSTRATION BY KATI SZILAGYI

I

worried about ringing the doorbell.

Then I noticed two ragged rectan-

gles of dried, blackened adhesive on

the door frame, one just above and one

just below the button. I deduced that

the button had been taped over at some

point but was now safe to use. I pressed

as gently as I could, and, when the door

opened, I was greeted by a couple in

their early sixties and their son. The

son has asked me to identify him only

as Mark, his middle name. He’s thirty

years old, and tall and trim. On the

day I visited, he was wearing a maroon

plaid shirt, a blue baseball cap, and the

kind of sound-deadening earmuffs you

might use at a shooting range.

Mark and I sat at opposite ends of a

long coffee table, in the living room, and

his parents sat on the couch. He took off

his earmuffs but didn’t put them away.

“I was living in California and working

in a noisy restaurant,” he said. “Some-

body would drop a plate or do something

loud, and I would have a flash of ear

pain. I would just kind of think to my-

self, Wow, that hurt—why was nobody

else bothered by that?” Then everything

suddenly got much worse. Quiet sounds

seemed loud to him, and loud sounds

were unendurable. Discomfort from a

single incident could last for days. He

quit his job and moved back in with his

parents. On his flight home, he leaned

all the way forward in his seat and cov-

ered his ears with his hands.

That was five years ago. Mark’s con-

dition is called hyperacusis. It can be

caused by overexposure to loud sounds,

although no one knows why some peo-

ple are more susceptible than others.

There is no known cure. Before the

onset of his symptoms, Mark lived a

life that was noise-filled but similar to

those of millions of his contemporar-

ies: garage band, earbuds, crowded bars,

concerts. The pain feels like “raw in-

flammation,” he said, and is accompa-

nied by pressure on his ears and his tem-

ples, by tension in the back of his head,

and, occasionally, by an especially dis-

turbing form of tinnitus: “You and I

would have a conversation, and then

after you’d left I’d go upstairs and some

phrase you had been saying would re-

peat over and over in my ear, almost

like a song when they have the reverb

going.” He manages his condition bet-

ter than he did five years ago, but he

still lives with his parents and doesn’t

have a job. The day before my visit, he

had winced when his father crumpled

a plastic cookie package that he was

putting in the recycling bin. By the end

of our conversation, which lasted a lit-

tle more than an hour, he had put his

earmuffs back on.

Hyperacusis is relatively rare, and

Mark’s case is severe, but hearing dam-

age and other problems caused by ex-

cessively loud sound are increasingly

common worldwide. Ears evolved in

an acoustic environment that was noth-

ing like the one we live in today. Dan-

iel Fink—a retired California internist,

whose own, milder hyperacusis began

in a noisy restaurant on New Year’s

Eve, 2007, and who is now an anti-noise

activist—told me, “Until the industrial

revolution, urban dwellers’ sleep was

disturbed mostly by the early calls of

roosters from back-yard chicken coops

or nearby farms.” The first serious

sufferers of occupational hearing loss

were probably workers who pounded

on metal: blacksmiths, church-bell ring-

ers, the people who built the boilers

that powered the steam engines that

created the modern world. (Audiolo-

gists used to refer to a particular high-

frequency hearing-loss pattern as a

“boilermaker’s notch.”)

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